Posts from — January 2006

Yeah, so I missed most of the State of the Union, forgetting about the time zone change (yeah, it STILL happens to me). But from the look of things, it was big business as usual so who gives a shit anyway. What’s been fun, in a staggeringly depressing way, is to review the snippets of Karl Rove’s — I mean the President’s — speech, against the cold truth of the facts behind the rhetoric. You can do this not on the major news outlets, because they are all whores who suck. I’m tired of George Snuffalupagus and god knows I don’t need to hear “The Democratic Response”, which is sure to be one more performance of people who still can’t get their shit together, whining ineffectively about this buffoon in office.

What you can do is head over to Think Progress’ site for a nice recap of the whole charade, with factual turdlets that follow each rosy assertion made by that incompetent jerkoff named Georgie Dubya Bush.

Houston, we no longer have a problem. It was the damned channel button.

For the last several months, I have lived in a state of worry and emasculation, unable to get my “home theater system” fully operational. I tried several times, under varying levels of intoxication, to hook up this collection of black boxes and cable spaghetti in just the right way, so that the stuff would actually fucking work as advertised, to no avail. Inevitably, one or more things would not behave. Couple this with an untimely demise of our old DVD player (first it showed movies in black&white, then it started refusing to even play audio cds), and you have me down at the BestBuy looking at DVD recorders. Luckily, my friend Perry was able to recommend a decent DVD recorder that was reasonably priced and was purported to do what I need, namely, a device that I can save TiVo and VHS recordings to, as well as play music and DVDs. I picked one up. After much cursing, I finally got the damned thing hooked up and playing DVDs. But the recording thing was still not working. The whole thing is made more annoying by the fact that my A/V components live in this little cubby next to the tv that is barely wide enough to turn the components around so you can look at the cable connections for the eight hundredth time. I tried a few more times, I cursed some more, and after a definitive “fuck it all, goddammit all to hell, I’m fucking done with this bullshit”, we (I) settled for playback-only mode for the time being. That was a few weeks ago.

Then, on Thursday, the sound died. There was no warning, and I assure you I made no changes, but all of a sudden we stopped getting sound from the main TV. It was time to get this sorted.

And so on Saturday, I pulled the entire rack out and placed it on the dining room table, so I could plug component video cables, audio cables, rca jacks and speaker wires in and out and in and out until I either had a heart attack, an orgasm, or everything was working as planned.

And I got it. Everything was working. I could watch TV, or I could switch input sources and watch a movie from the vcr or the dvd player, and I could also get a TiVo signal through the DVD recorder.

Then I disassembled everything and stuffed it back into the cubby, violating rule number one of final assembly: I buttoned everything up nice and neat, as if I wouldn’t have to take it apart again. And so of course I was greeted by a blue screen when I was supposed to be watching a fucking DVD.

Well, it turns out that when you want to watch a TiVo recording through the vcr and through the dvd recorder, you need to set the vcr to channel 3 on the box, and hit tv/vcr on the vcr remote, set the input source to color stream on the TiVo remote, and then make sure the stereo is on and set to dvd so you have audio, and like fifty other things that I’ve already forgotten, and god help us when our cat walks on the remotes again.

So, I finally have the ability to save to DVD things I’ve recorded with TiVo. More on this later. In the meantime, DON’T TOUCH THE REMOTES! DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING! IT’S WORKING!!!!

Well, at long last, I have finally flown around in sunny Colorado. In July of last year, I sold my beloved Cessna 150, knowing full well that the little 100HP plane would not be terribly useful in the high country of Colorado. I also sorta put all aviation on hold, as there was a bit of financial uncertainty involved with moving 2/3 of the way across the country and buying a new house. Besides, I was getting my cycling fix. But ever since arriving in Boulder, I have thought about flying. The local airport is only three miles from my house, and the glider towplanes fly over my office every day. The scenery of Colorado’s front range is breathtaking, and I’ve been thinking about what it must be like to view it from the air.

After a false start last week, where I had a plane and instructor booked but had to sit on the ground and watch the windsock point straight out, I woke up this morning to calm winds and incredible visibility. It was time to get back in the air.

I met my instructor and after a preflight we hopped in and fired up. After the run-up, I got an intro to leaning for performance at altitude, something I never had to worry about down at sea level. After that, it was time to fly. The goal was to fly around, get familiar with the local area, and get acquainted with flying at altitude, where some things work a little differently.

We climbed out to the east, and I demonstrated some maneuvers such as slow flight, steep turns and stalls, all the while making our way to Platte Valley airpark for a touch & go. My first landing at altitude was… pretty straightforward. Your groundspeed is higher than it is down at sea level, but it actually feels more comfortable for some reason. But the runway sure does fly by, and planning and airspeed control is definitely more important than ever up here.

After Platte Valley, we headed oer to nearby Erie Municipal for another couple of landings. From there, it was up to Longmont’s Vance Brand Airport, and them back to Boulder Muni for what was supposed to be a full stop landing but ended up being a go-around following a too-high approach.

All in all, I flew OK, and the instructor felt the flying was solid enough to wrap up my biennial flight review and sign me off to take the plane out solo from now on! So after a six month dry spell, I am once again kicked from the roost and am looking forward to soaring above Boulder. The challenges of the mountains are the next task.

Denver CO (Jeffco) [KBJC] hourly observation on the 14th at 7:45am MST (1445Z)
wind calm, visibility 80 miles, 15,000 feet scattered, 25,000 feet broken, temperature 6°C (43°F), dewpoint -12°C (10°F), altimeter 29.97.

(looks like I’m goin’ flyin’!)

The other day, I was gushing on this site about my newfound access to a dual processor linux machine. But now, after yesterday’s announcement at Macworld, I have ordered one of the new Apple laptops, which will sport a dual core Intel cpu. Come February (hopefully), I’ll have a personal computer that’s about eight times faster than my current one, at a cost about $300 cheaper than the last Powerbook I bought four years ago. Unbelievable.

I know I’m in for some version 1.0 blues, as new hardware and software always have some “issues”, but I’m looking forward to being able to run Radiance simulations on my lap, try out the new Tiger features ( I’m still on OS X 10.3) and generally just geek out. If they ever figure out how to get Windows running on these new Apple laptops too, I could finally blow up my Windows computer (I need Windows for MS Flight Simulator and AutoCAD — note the order of importance). Interesting times ahead…

This year for Christmas, Brenda got her standard Christmas present from her Grandmother: an Applebee’s gift certificate. Back in New Jersey, we’d hit Applebee’s once every couple weeks, since there was one down the road from us, and it was the lesser of several evils. Living in Middlesex County, NJ, we were within miles of basically all the chain restaurants in the universe, including TGI Friday’s, a place where on one particularly sad summer afternoon Brenda was lamenting the lack of healthy menu choices and the waiter said “if you were looking for healthy, you shouldn’t have come here”.

Flash forward to winter, Boulder, CO. Here, surrounded by olympians and health fanatics, we have organic restaurants and the like. But corporate america being what it is (a slimy, pompous conglomerate always looking to make a buck), they still have set up outposts here in Boulder for their way of life. And so there is a Boulder Applebee’s. And here’s the thing: tonight, we went to cash in the gift card, and walked into the sleepiest Applebee’s in the nation.

It was painfully obvious that the Boulder Applebee’s does not sell anywhere near as many king-sized chicken-fried buffalo riblet platters as they do at the one down the street from our old place in Jersey, and Brenda & I took one look around and laughed.

I of course got a burger with bacon and cheese and fries, and probably made the cook’s day, but it was funny seeing the empty dining room, in stark contrast to what I’m quite certain is a packed house at the Applebee’s (and TGI Friday’s, and Fuddruckers, et al.) tonight back in Joisey.

I swear, I’m not losing interest in the blog thing. I dunno, I guess I have less to complain about.

Just to update, I built a pair of wheels for the first time in twelve years. Pictures to follow. My Singlespeed Project nears completion — in fact, I will ride it to work tomorrow, sans rear brake and handlebar tape; pictures to follow. I spent a couple hours the last two days at the airport, and met a couple of nice guys who I plan to fly with shortly; I’m gonna get back into flying soon, real soon! I also discovered that I live so close to the local airport that I can not only see the airport beacon at night from my kitchen window, but I can also recieve the AWOS on my handheld radio from the comfort of my living room couch. This is handy, because when I see the trees bend in half in front of my home, I can quickly tune the awos to see that that was a 35 knot sustained wind peppered with a 47 knot gust that caused it (goddamned wind is what kept me on the goddamned ground all goddamned weekend, goddammit).

Yesterday it was in the 70’s, and Brenda & I rode our bikes downtown for food and shopping. This place is paradise. Yeah, I know we’re only a third of the way through the winter, and I know there is more snow on the way, but so far, this beats the shit out of waiting for the (always late) 8:13 “express” at motherfucking Metropark station. Hippies be damned, this place rocks.

Today I was supposed to fly (again) but the wind had other ideas (again). But I met an Old Guy who is into tailgragger instruction, so I’m starting to think I found some guys who will be fun to fly with and may even teach me a thing or two, something I thought I lost forever when I left John and all the guys at Andover Flight behind in New Jersey.

Certainly, pictures and words are soon to follow, about bicycles and airplanes and people, and that should be as good a review as any about the current state of affairs.

To use the parlance of this place, it’s all good, no worries, NICE.